http://www.newsmakingnews.com/#INSLAW'S EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: INSLAW'S EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Thanks to Nato Wife for the tip here. The following information has been given to each member of the House Judiciary Committee and was placed on the Internet in electronic form by Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Corporation. The complete document with supporting details may be obtained from: Inslaw 1125 15th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005-2707 Telephone (202) 828-8638 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Eleven years ago, the Justice Department's PROMIS Project Manager arranged for an Israeli Government official to visit INSLAW for a PROMIS briefing and demonstration. The Justice Department told INSLAW that the visitor was a prosecuting attorney from the Israeli Ministry of Justice who would be overseeing a project to computerize the public prosecution offices in Israel. Three months after the visit, the Justice Department secretly turned over to a representative of the Israeli Government a copy of the PROMIS software, according to a contemporaneous internal Justice Department memorandum made public by the House Judiciary Committee in its September 1992 Investigative Report, The INSLAW Affair. INSLAW followed up on this disclosure by the House Judiciary Committee by contacting the Israeli Ministry of Justice in Tel Aviv about the "prosecuting attorney" who had visited INSLAW ten years earlier in February 1983. After obtaining information from the Ministry about the current location of the prosecuting attorney, INSLAW consulted with two journalists in Tel Aviv. One journalist interviewed the now-retired prosecuting attorney at his home in Jerusalem. The prosecuting attorney bore no resemblance to the visitor to INSLAW and was unfamiliar with some important aspects of the visit to INSLAW, although he claimed to have been the February 1983 Israeli visitor to INSLAW. The other journalist told INSLAW that the prosecuting attorney's name has been used in the past as a pseudonym for Rafi Eitan, a legendary Israeli intelligence official. INSLAW employees who had met with the Israeli visitor in February 1983 attempted to identify the visitor from a police-style photographic line-up. The process was videotaped in the studio of a national television network. The photographic line-up confirmed that the visitor to INSLAW was neither a prosecutor nor an attorney, but Rafi Eitan. At the time of the visit to INSLAW, Rafi Eitan was Director of LAKAM, a super-secret agency in the Israeli Ministry of Defense responsible for collecting scientific and technical intelligence information from other countries through espionage. Rafi Eitan became well known in the United States, several years after his visit to INSLAW, when Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy civilian intelligence analyst, was arrested and charged with spying for Rafi Eitan and Israeli intelligence. During the interim between Rafi Eitan's visit to INSLAW and the delivery of a copy of PROMIS to an Israeli official, the Government's PROMIS Project Manager and others in the Justice Department pressured INSLAW to deliver to the Justice Department, without any protection for INSLAW's property rights, the proprietary version of PROMIS that was not required to be delivered under INSLAW's PROMIS Implementation Contract. The particular proprietary version of PROMIS that was the object of this Justice Department pressure was the version that INSLAW had demonstrated to the Israeli Government visitor and that operates on a VAX computer. INSLAW was operating this proprietary version of PROMIS on a computer at INSLAW's offices and using it to support each of the 10 largest U.S. Attorneys' Offices, via telephone lines. Under its three-year contract, INSLAW was to provide this PROMIS computer time-sharing service on an interim basis until each of the U.S. Attorneys' Offices acquired its own computer, and INSLAW thereafter was to install an earlier, public domain version of PROMIS on those computers. The Justice Department explained this pressure to obtain immediate delivery of a copy of the proprietary VAX version of PROMIS by a suddenly-professed concern about INSLAW's financial viability. In response to this professed concern, INSLAW offered to place a copy of the VAX version of PROMIS in escrow in a local bank; that would have been the accepted industry remedy for the professed problem. The Justice Department, however, rejected INSLAW's escrow offer and insisted on immediately obtaining physical custody of a copy of the proprietary VAX version of PROMIS. The Justice Department eventually accomplished its objective of physical custody of a copy of the VAX version of PROMIS through a bilateral modification to the contract in which the Government committed itself, inter alia, not to disseminate the proprietary version of PROMIS outside the U.S. Attorneys' Offices. This was the April 11, 1983 Modification #12 to the PROMIS Implementation Contract. None of the U.S. Attorneys' Offices had a VAX computer, without which it is impossible to use a VAX version of PROMIS. Two lower federal courts found that the Justice Department entered into Modification #12 in order to "steal" the proprietary version of PROMIS "through trickery, fraud and deceit." The House Judiciary Committee independently confirmed those findings in the course of a three- year-long investigation. Rafi Eitan emerged again in the INSLAW affair in 1986 when INSLAW filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department over the theft of the PROMIS software. INSLAW's lead litigation counsel was fired by his law firm amid secret communications between the law firm and the two highest officials of the U.S. Justice Department. The Attorney General stated under oath and the Deputy Attorney General claimed to the Senate that the secret discussions were about the INSLAW case; the law firm claimed to the press that the secret discussions were about its concurrent representation in the Jonathan Pollard-Rafi Eitan espionage case. In May 1986, three years to the month after the Justice Department secretly turned over a copy of PROMIS to an Israeli Government official, INSLAW and senior partners in the law firm that was then serving as INSLAW's litigation counsel reviewed a complaint, drafted by INSLAW's lead counsel, for the lawsuit against the Justice Department about the theft of the proprietary version of PROMIS. The complaint contained over 50 references to Jensen; included was a 23-paragraph section that described the "personal involvement" of then Deputy Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen in the INSLAW affair, beginning with Jensen's tenure as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division during the first several years of the Reagan Administration. The law firm immediately rejected the complaint that had been drafted by the lead counsel and set about to redraft the complaint in its entirety, assigning two additional lawyers to the INSLAW case for that purpose. These lawyers soon produced a new complaint that omitted every reference to the role of D. Lowell Jensen. Prior to the filing of the revised complaint in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the lead counsel inserted, at INSLAW's insistence, a single parenthetical reference to Jensen's role. In October 1986, three months after INSLAW filed its lawsuit, the law firm fired INSLAW's lead counsel who had by then been a partner in the firm for 10 years. The lead counsel told INSLAW at the time that he had been fired for naming Jensen in the complaint. He also told INSLAW at the time that the Managing Partner had stated that Senior Partner Leonard Garment had instigated the firing. On October 6, 1986, one week before Leonard Garment and the other members of the law firm's Senior Policy Committee met to vote on the decision to expel INSLAW's lead counsel from the firm, Garment had a social luncheon regarding INSLAW with Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns. Garment never disclosed this fact either to INSLAW's lead counsel or to INSLAW. Burns had succeeded Jensen as Deputy Attorney General in the summer of 1986 when Jensen left the Justice Department to become a U.S. District Court Judge in San Francisco. During the luncheon, Burns complained to Garment about the litigation strategy that INSLAW's lead counsel was pursuing in its lawsuit against the Department and signaled to Garment his willingness to discuss a settlement, according to Burns' later disclosures to the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. Attorney General Meese also talked to Garment in October 1986 about INSLAW and about Garment's conversation with Burns relating to INSLAW, according to later sworn Justice Department responses to INSLAW interrogatories. In early 1988, in statements to the press, Garment disclaimed any recollection of a discussion about INSLAW with Deputy Attorney General Burns and insisted that his October 1986 discussion with Attorney General Meese had been about Israel, not INSLAW. Moreover, Garment elaborated on this claim, reportedly telling at least one journalist that it was a discussion of a "back channel" communication that Garment had had with the Government of Israel about the Pollard case, which Garment described to the journalist as a national security problem affecting both Israel and the U.S. Justice Department. The Israeli Government had retained Garment in an effort to prevent the indictment by the U.S. Justice Department of other Israeli officials involved in the Pollard espionage scandal. The central role of Rafi Eitan and Israeli intelligence in both the INSLAW affair and the Pollard espionage scandal may account for why Meese and Burns characterized the October 1986 discussions with Garment as having to do with INSLAW, while Garment insisted they were really about a national security problem of concern to both Israel and the U.S. Justice Department. When Garment's law firm fired INSLAW's lead counsel, it agreed to make severance payments to him in excess of half-a-million dollars and contractually bound him to secrecy about the severance. Soon after firing INSLAW's lead counsel, the law firm, which had, by then, been representing INSLAW for almost a year, suddenly claimed to have discovered fatal deficiencies in the evidence available to prove the Justice Department's 1983 theft of PROMIS. The law firm presented INSLAW with a written ultimatum to concede to the Justice Department on that question or find new litigation counsel. INSLAW found new litigation counsel and proved in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court and the U.S. District Court that the Justice Department had stolen the PROMIS software in 1983. A former Israeli intelligence official, Ari Ben Menashe, published a book in the fall of 1992 entitled Profits of War, that contains specific claims about Rafi Eitan and the PROMIS software, many of which are plausible in view of the aforementioned facts. According to the author, a high-ranking member of the White House National Security Council staff was personally involved in the delivery of a copy of the proprietary version of PROMIS to Rafi Eitan during a visit by Rafi Eitan to Washington, DC in the early 1980's. Robert McFarlane, who during the relevant period was Deputy National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and Earl W. Brian, a private businessman who had been a member of the California cabinet of Governor Ronald Reagan, secretly presented INSLAW's proprietary software to Rafi Eitan, according to the author. The objective of the alleged White House gift of INSLAW's software to Rafi Eitan and Israeli intelligence was for Israeli intelligence, through sales conducted by cutout companies, to disseminate PROMIS to foreign intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and international commercial banks so that PROMIS could function in those target organizations as an electronic Trojan horse for Allied signal intelligence agencies, according to the author. Among the individuals whose companies served as cutouts for the illegal dissemination of PROMIS by Israeli intelligence, according to the author, were Earl W. Brian and the late British publisher, Robert Maxwell. Earl W. Brian, for example, allegedly sold the proprietary version of PROMIS to Jordanian military intelligence, so that Israeli signal intelligence could surreptitiously access the computerized Jordanian dossiers on Palestinians. When INSLAW sought redress in the federal courts in 1986 for the Justice Department's 1983 theft of PROMIS, Israeli intelligence intervened to obstruct justice, according to the author. While employed in Tel Aviv by Israeli military intelligence, Ben Menashe claims to have seen a wire transfer of $600,000 to Earl W. Brian for use in financing a severance agreement between INSLAW's fired lead counsel and his law firm. Rafi Eitan drew the funds from a slush fund jointly administered by U.S. and Israeli intelligence, and Earl W. Brian was, in turn, to relay the money to Leonard Garment, according to the author. In a meeting at the Justice Department on December 16, 1993, INSLAW presented a sensitive document, authored by a self-evidently credible person, offering, under appropriate circumstances, to make available evidence corroborative of significant elements of Ben Menashe's published claims. Another aspect of the role of Israeli intelligence in the INSLAW affair is its alleged use of Robert Maxwell as a cutout. Maxwell's role as a cutout for a foreign nation's sale of computer software has been implicitly acknowledged by the actions of the FBI. Robert Maxwell's dissemination of computer software was the subject of an FBI foreign counterintelligence investigation in 1984. Ten years later, in January 1994, INSLAW obtained, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 18 pages relating to an investigation on this subject in New Mexico in June 1984. The FBI furnished the documents to INSLAW in response to a FOIA request for documents relating to Maxwell's involvement in "the dissemination, marketing or sale of computer software systems, including but not limited to the PROMIS computer software product, between 1983 and 1992." The FBI heavily redacted the 18 pages and ascribed the redactions to the secrecy requirements of national security. One month before the FBI released the documents to INSLAW, it partially reclassified two of the pages that had been officially declassified in their entirety one year earlier. The FBI redacted the newly reclassified portions in the copies given to INSLAW. Robert Maxwell also developed a business relationship during the latter half of the 1980's with two computer systems executives from the Meese Justice Department, at least one of whom had responsibilities relating to the proprietary version of PROMIS. Robert Maxwell set up a tiny publishing company in McLean, Virginia, in August 1985. That company then hired two senior computer systems executives from a unit of the Meese Justice Department that operated the proprietary version of PROMIS. One was the Director of the Justice Data Center, the Justice Department's own internal computer time-sharing facility where the proprietary IBM version of PROMIS was operating for one of the legal divisions under license from INSLAW. The Director of the Justice Data Center resigned his estimated $90,000-a-year Senior Executive Service position to become Vice President for Technical Services at the six-employee start-up national defense publishing company owned by Robert Maxwell. In piecing together the puzzle of the Government's theft of the proprietary version of PROMIS from INSLAW, we have noted the role of the Government's PROMIS Project Manger in sending Rafi Eitan to INSLAW under false pretenses and the alleged role of a senior White House National Security official in giving the proprietary version of PROMIS to Rafi Eitan. The missing piece to the puzzle appears to be the piece that links the actions of the Justice Department's PROMIS Project Manager with the alleged actions of the senior White House National Security official. Based on the available evidence, the missing piece appears to be D. Lowell Jensen, who was Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division at the time of the theft. Jensen pre-approved virtually every decision taken by the Government's PROMIS Project Manager under INSLAW's contract, according to the latter's sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. Jensen engineered INSLAW's problems with the Justice Department through specified top Criminal Division aides in order to give the PROMIS business to unidentified "friends," according to Justice Department officials whose statements and backgrounds INSLAW summarized in its July 11, 1993 rebuttal. At the time of the 1983 theft, Jensen in the Criminal Division and Edwin Meese at the White House were planning to award a massive sweetheart contract to unidentified "friends" for the installation of PROMIS in every litigation office of the Justice Department, according to statements made in June 1983 by a Justice Department whistleblower to the staff of a Senator on the Judiciary Committee. The award was allegedly to take place once Meese left the White House to become Attorney General. Jensen and Meese had been close friends since the 1960's when they served together in the Alameda County, California, District Attorney's Office. INSLAW has repeatedly given the Justice Department the names of senior Criminal Division officials under Jensen who either allegedly helped him implement the malfeasance against INSLAW or who allegedly witnessed it. On more than one occasion, INSLAW summarized for the Justice Department the circumstantial evidence that is at least partially corroborative of these allegations. Based on warnings from confidential informants in the Justice Department, INSLAW has repeatedly emphasized to the Justice Department the absolute necessity of placing these officials under oath before interrogating them, as well as the importance of a public statement by the Attorney General guaranteeing no reprisals. More than five years have elapsed since INSLAW began furnishing this information to the Justice Department. Not one of these Criminal Division officials has, it appears, ever been interrogated under oath regarding the INSLAW affair. And no Attorney General has seen fit to issue a public statement to Justice Department employees making it clear that the Attorney General wishes employees who have information about the INSLAW affair to come forward, and giving Justice Department employees the public assurance that reprisals will not be tolerated. One of the senior Criminal Division officials who allegedly knows the whole story of Jensen's malfeasance against INSLAW is Mark Richard, the career Deputy Assistant Attorney General who has responsibility for intelligence and national security matters. In May 1988, the Chief Investigator of the Senate Judiciary Committee told INSLAW that a trusted source, who was in a position to observe Jensen's malfeasance, had identified Mark Richard as someone who not only knew the whole story but who was also "pretty upset" about it. One of the organizational units that reports to Mark Richard is the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). OSI's publicly-declared mission is to locate and deport Nazi war criminals. The Nazi war criminal program is, however, a front for the Justice Department's own covert intelligence service, according to disclosures recently made to INSLAW by several senior Justice Department career officials. One undeclared mission of this covert intelligence service has been the illegal dissemination of the proprietary version of PROMIS, according to information from reliable sources with ties to the U.S. intelligence community. INSLAW has, moreover, obtained a copy of a 27-page Justice Department computer printout, labeled "Criminal Division Vendor List." That list is actually a list of the commercial organizations and individuals who serve as "cutouts" for this secret Justice Department intelligence agency, according to intelligence community informants and a preliminary analysis of the computerized list. A significant proportion of the 100-plus companies on the list appear to be in the computer industry. The Justice Department's secret intelligence agency also has its own "proprietary" company that employs scores of agents of diverse nationalities, as well as individuals who appear to be regular employees of various departments and agencies of the U.S. Government or members of the U.S. Armed Forces, according to several sources. According to written statements of which INSLAW has obtained copies, another undeclared mission of the Justice Department's covert agents was to insure that investigative journalist Danny Casolaro remained silent about the role of the Justice Department in the INSLAW scandal by murdering him in West Virginia in August 1991. INSLAW has acquired copies of two relevant written statements furnished to a veteran investigative journalist by a national security operative of the U.S. Government, several months after Casolaro's death. The individual who reportedly transmitted these written statements to the journalist by fax has testified under oath to being a national security operative for the FBI and the CIA. Partial corroboration for his claimed work for the FBI is reportedly available in the sworn testimony of several FBI agents during a recent criminal prosecution. One statement purportedly reflects the operative's personal knowledge and belief that Casolaro was killed by agents of the Justice Department and is allegedly written in the operative's own hand. The other statement is an excerpt from a typewritten set of questions and answers. The questions were posed to a senior CIA official by the investigative journalist; the answers, purportedly from the senior CIA official, were reportedly sent by fax to the journalist by the national security operative, who was acting as an intermediary. The following is the pertinent question and answer: Q. Do you have any information for [San Francisco-based investigative journalist] George Williamson yet regarding the Danny Casolaro matter? A. Yes. Casolaro appears to have been working as a free lance writer at the time of his death and was gathering material for a book. He was investigating the INSLAW case. He was on the trail of information that could have made the whole matter public and led to the exposure of the Justice Department and their involvement in the matter. Apparently he was very close to obtaining that information. We do not agree with the consensus of opinion among the reporters who looked into the matter, that Casolaro committed suicide. Casolaro was murdered by agents of the Justice Department to insure his silence. The entire matter was handled internally by Justice, and our agency was not involved. Although these allegations are profoundly disturbing, there is significant circumstantial evidence that bears on the plausibility of the allegations. As reported in INSLAW's July 11, 1993 rebuttal, Casolaro was scheduled to have his final, follow-up meeting with two sources on INSLAW in West Virginia the night before he died, and one of those sources was connected to the Justice Department's PROMIS Contracting Officer. As reported in this addendum, the meeting between Casolaro and those sources had allegedly been brokered by a covert intelligence operative for the U.S. Government, an Army Special Forces Major. This individual appeared in Casolaro's life during the final several weeks and introduced himself to Casolaro as one of the closest friends of the Government's PROMIS Contracting Officer. Finally, during the final week of his life, Casolaro told at least five confidants something that he had never told a single one of them at any other time during his year-long, full-time investigation: that he had just broken the INSLAW case. The preceding facts and the following information are noted in the July 11, 1993 rebuttal. Shortly after Casolaro was found dead, the aforementioned covert intelligence operative allegedly made the following statement, in words or substance, to a woman who had been present during several of his meetings with Casolaro: What Danny Casolaro was investigating is a business. If you don't want to end up like Danny or like the journalist who died a horrific death in Guatemala, you'll stay out of this. Anyone who asks too many questions will end up dead. Not all of the secret Justice Department dissemination of PROMIS has gone through Rafi Eitan and Israeli intelligence. For example, in June 1983, the month after the Justice Department secretly conveyed a copy of PROMIS to a representative of the Government of Israel, it also, in partnership with the National Security Agency (NSA), secretly delivered a copy of PROMIS to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, according to a recent series of articles in the American Banker's International Banking Regulator. The Justice Department and its NSA partner conveyed a copy of the proprietary VAX version of PROMIS to the two international financial institutions so that the NSA could electronically monitor their operations. This is the same version of PROMIS that the Justice Department had asked INSLAW to demonstrate to Rafi Eitan in February 1983. As noted earlier, the Justice Department had committed itself not to disseminate the proprietary version of PROMIS outside the U.S. Attorneys' Offices. A second example is the alleged secret Justice Department conveyance of a copy of the proprietary IBM version of PROMIS to the CIA. In September 1993, CIA Director R. James Woolsey told INSLAW counsel Elliot L. Richardson that the CIA is using a PROMIS software system that it acquired from the NSA and that is identical to the PROMIS software that NSA uses internally and that is described on page 80 of the Bua Report. The application domain of the NSA's PROMIS is the mission critical application of tracking the intelligence information it produces. The NSA's PROMIS operates on an IBM mainframe computer. This latest CIA disclosure underscores the difficulty the CIA has had in accounting for its PROMIS. The CIA initially told the House Judiciary Committee in writing that it had been unable to locate internally any PROMIS software. Approximately one year later, the CIA wrote again to the House Judiciary Committee, stating that components of the CIA were operating a software system called PROMIS but that it had purchased its PROMIS from a company in Massachusetts. That PROMIS operates on a personal computer with project management as the application domain. In both written reports, the CIA inexplicably failed to mention the PROMIS that operates on an IBM mainframe computer at the CIA and that is critical to the CIA's primary mission of producing intelligence information. The third example is the alleged Justice Department secret dissemination of PROMIS to the NSA. Although the NSA is quoted in the Bua Report as claiming that it internally developed its PROMIS, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported in May 1986 that the NSA had purchased a PROMIS software system from a Toronto-based company. As shown in Exhibit A to INSLAW's July 11, 1993 rebuttal, Earl Brian's Hadron, Inc. sold INSLAW's PROMIS to the same Toronto company in 1983, in a transaction that also allegedly involved Edwin Meese, then Counselor to the President. The final example concerns the allegation that the Justice Department secretly distributed the proprietary VAX version of PROMIS to the U.S. Navy for an intelligence application on board nuclear submarines. The Navy confirmed to a reporter for Navy Times that it has a PROMIS software system and that it operates its PROMIS on a VAX computer in support of its nuclear submarines. The Navy's Undersea Systems Center in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, furthermore, notified the reporter in writing that its engineers had locally developed this VAX version of PROMIS; that its PROMIS is installed only at its land-based facility at Newport, Rhode Island; and that its PROMIS has never been installed on board any nuclear submarine. INSLAW has, however, obtained a document published by the same Undersea Systems Center in 1987 that reveals that its PROMIS is not only operating at the land-based "test facility" in Newport, but is also operational on board both attack class and "boomer" class submarines. The Navy, like the CIA and the NSA, clearly has difficulty in giving a credible accounting of its PROMIS software. The Justice Department continues to try to convince INSLAW, Congress, the press and the American public that the INSLAW affair is, at best, a government contract dispute which could have been resolved long ago if INSLAW had submitted the dispute to the only forum deemed appropriate by the Justice Department: an Executive Branch Contract Appeals Board. What the evidence summarized in this addendum demonstrates, however, is that the essence of the INSLAW affair is radically different. The INSLAW affair was a premeditated, cynical and deceitful taking of INSLAW's software property by the chief law enforcement agency of the United States without due process of law and without compensation to INSLAW in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. They [the Hamiltons] don't know squat about how dirty that INSLAW deal was. If they ever find out half of it, they will be sickened. It is a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than Watergate. It is not just the breadth of it, but also the depth of it. The Department of Justice has been compromised at every level. - Statements attributed to a senior Justice Department career official by the Chief Investigator of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1988 (Schematic depicting the alleged use of INSLAW's PROMIS Computer Software Product to satisfy a longstanding need for compatible database software within the U.S. Intelligence community.) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Individual Agency PROMIS Database - known internally as FOIMS (Field Office Information Management System) Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Individual Agency PROMIS Database Master PROMIS Database White House National Security Council (NSC) Individual Agency PROMIS Database Primary Telecommunications Network for PROMIS Data National Security Agency (NSA) Exchange: INFO NET Individual Agency PROMIS Database Alternative Telecommunications Networks for PROMIS Data Exchange: Internet Use Net Each Nuclear Submarine allegedly has a copy of the CIA's Master PROMIS Database in the event of a national emergency. Each submarine receives regular updates from the CIA via one of the telecommunications networks. http://www.newsmakingnews.com/
